I saw this item in today’s Code Project newsletter, and I find it very interesting that a wide variety of GNU/Linux distributions (the OS Steve Balmer called a virus) are now being very actively supported by the corporation. The article provides a very detailed overview of how they do it.
My gut tells me that the dev team was under the gun to get the patch out the door, as if on some poorly conceived schedule, and couldn’t do their due diligence, before releasing it, either that, or someone was simply lazy/too dependent on automated checks, to properly verify the correctness of the patch.